Heather Bates, MSW

Heather Bates comes to Transform Health with over twenty years of experience in the field of health policy program design, outreach and enrollment strategy, nonprofit capacity building, strategic planning, workforce development, and facilitation. In her role as the Chief Operations Officer and Vice President of Stakeholder Engagement, Heather spearheads the firm’s outreach and enrollment program efforts, oversees daily operations, and offers guiding strategic leadership across all teams.

Heather began her career in direct service with the homebound aged population, eventually shifting towards policy and program design to focus on systems change. Since then, Heather has designed, developed, and led a variety of nonprofit programming and stakeholder engagement efforts around the country centered on Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. Her previous roles include Director of Community Engagement for the national, Washington, DC-based nonprofit, Families USA, where she led state-based targeted health care defense campaigns and curated the nationwide enrollment assister network. While at Enroll America, she also created and directed northeast and midwest regional outreach, best practices education, and messaging campaigns to implement the Affordable Care Act. Before the ACA, Heather served for several years as the Vice President for the Medicare Rights Center, where she helped restructure the organization’s client services programming from the ground- up, and expanded their national training and technical assistance role.

Heather is an expert coach, mentor, trainer, and facilitator. She has helped numerous nonprofits and government institutions build their capacity, including state-based exchanges, Primary Care Associations, Federally Qualified Health Centers, and nonprofits. Skilled in strategic planning, Heather has helped many C-Suite executives develop strategies to engage and motivate their staff in order to meet organizational goals.

An Ohio native, Heather obtained her bachelor’s degree from Ohio University and her master’s degree in Social Work from the New York City Hunter College School of Social Work. She’s also an alumnus of Cincinnati’s performing arts school, and considers every training or presentation she gives a chance to get back to her performing roots.